From the beginning, Ismael Lagares seems to have set himself a single objective as an artist: to showcase painting to the world in its fullness, to materialize its pure and absolute presence. This is not a new aim, of course, and those who have embarked on this path against almost all our pictorial tradition generally share the sameobjective. To clear away all meditation - of meanings, representations, intentions, concepts or contexts - that might stand in the way between what is a body of purely physical and sensorial qualities and the sensibility of the person who it is exposed to it.

The two series presented in this new solo exhibition with Aurora Vigil-Escalera are a new step in this continuous and coherent evolution, with very different aims, based respectively on the predominance of white or color. In the first of these, surely the most refined of the artist's works in strictly formal terms, Lagares opens up new expressive territories based on the balance between his monochromatic series and the vehemence of color and gives all the prominence to the ceramic pieces, integrated within the whiteness of the background: a kind of great visual respite that clears our gaze and refreshes the familiar forms without in any way renouncing the usual effects of materiality, movement and physical presence that define Lagares’ language.

This exercise in chromatic discipline overflows, on the contrary, in the series based on colors: a feast of harmonies and contrasts based on a background tone uponwhich textures and volumes unfold, sinuous cords of paint and organic folds of ceramic and oil paint that radiate a lively, acidic light. In this collection, the artist seems to have given himself over to the play with recognizablefigures from the world beyond painting with a certain youthful carefreeness and an explosion of creativity which, nevertheless comes from the hand -and brush- of a technical master."

Extract of the Exhibition Catalogue by Juan Carlos Gea